Writers Week 2013: November 4–8
Each year, Writers Week brings together visiting writers of local and national interest, UNCW students, and members of the general public with an interest in literature and writing. Activities throughout the week include workshops, panels, and readings.
United States Poet Laureate (2012-2013) and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Natasha Tretheway will be our keynote speaker, reading on November 7.
More details will be posted in October.
Mark your calendars! We will see you then.
Writers Week 2012: November 5–9
Fall 2012 WW Schedule
Keynote |
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Bill Roorbach writes both fiction and nonfiction and is the author of a number of books, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend (University of Georgia Press, 2001), Into Woods (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), and Temple Stream (Random House, 2005). Life Among Giants, a novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books, November 13, 2012. The tenth-anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories (Story Press, 2008), is used in writing programs around the world. Recently Bill was a judge on Food Network’s All-Star Chef Challenge, evaluating incredible Life Stories cakes made under the gun, so to speak. Bill knows nothing about cake, but he knows a lot about life stories! His work has been published in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. His story "Big Bend" was featured on NPR's Selected Shorts, read by actor James Cromwell at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Bill has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and Ohio State. His last academic position was the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He has now left academia in order to write full time.
Panel: Professional Issues for Students in the Digital Age (with Brian Evenson, David Gessner, and Beth Staples) |
Visiting Writers |
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Chuck Adams has worked in the publishing business for more than forty years, with his longest stints at Dell/Delacorte (now an imprint of Random House), Simon & Schuster, and, currently, Algonquin Books. During that time he has edited many dozens of books, by such authors as Mary Higgins Clark, Susan Cheever, Sara Gruen, James Lee Burke, Sandra Brown, Joseph Heller, Joe McGinniss, Jackie Collins, and Robert Goolrick, as well as many celebrity authors including Cher, Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor, Sarah Ferguson, and Neil Simon. His taste is eclectic.
A Discussion with Chuck Adams, Executive Editor of Algonquin Books |
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Anne Akers is the School Library Media and Graduate Support Coordinator for the School of Education at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She previously served as director of the College of Education Media Center (curriculum materials center) at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where she also held an adjunct assistant professor appointment with the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Counselor Education (CICE). She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in instructional technology, literacy, social studies, action research, and content area reading. Her teaching experience includes online and face-to-face instruction using social constructivist pedagogy. She has also worked as a radio copy editor, a high school reading and English teacher, and a media and technology coordinator in K–12 public schools in both rural and urban settings in Virginia, Mississippi, and North Carolina. Additionally, she has also worked as a children’s librarian in a public library. Dr. Akers received a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from Westhampton College of the University of Richmond, a master’s in history from Virginia Tech, an MLS from East Carolina University, and a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a focus on literacy and technology from NCSU. She holds a current North Carolina teaching certificate with licensure in K–12 media and secondary English and social studies. She has provided professional development across the state, and presented at state conferences and at the American Association of School Librarians Conference. She is the recipient of various honors and grants, including a 2005 NCSU College of Education Award for Excellence.
Panel: Library & Information Studies: Career Opportunities for Writers in the Digital Age (with Michelle Crouch, Doug Diesenhaus, and Sarah Barbara Watstein) |
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Jen Bervin's work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist’s books, and large-scale art works. Her books include The Gorgeous Nothings (2012), The Dickinson Composites (2010), and The Desert (2008) from Granary Books, and The Silver Book (2010), A Non-Breaking Space (2005), and Nets (2004, fifth printing 2010) from Ugly Duckling Presse. Her work has been published in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press), READ (1913 Press), Figuring Color (ICA Boston/ Hatje Cantz), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press 2011), La Familia Americana (Spain: Antonio Machado Libros, 2010), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (UK: Reality Street Editions, 2008), and is forthcoming in The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Telephone Books/Nightboat Books) and a German anthology on appropriation literature (Luxbooks). Upcoming exhibitions include Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and HELP/LESS at Printed Matter in New York. Recent exhibitions include: Jen Bervin: Weaving at Gridspace in Brooklyn; The Wildest Word We Consign to Language at Poets House in New York; and the group show Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited at EFA Project Space in New York. Bervin has received fellowships in art and writing from The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Centrum, The MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop, The Center for Book Arts, and The Camargo Foundation. Her work is in more than thirty collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Stanford University, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the British Library. She curated the New York exhibition Emily Dickinson at Poets House: Manuscripts from the Donald and Patricia Oresman Collection—a rare selection of the poet Emily Dickinson's original manuscripts. Bervin teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and guest-taught recently at Harvard University and Haystack. She was the Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia early this year, is currently an Artist-in-Residence at The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, and will be an Artist-in-Residence at Mills College in the Book Arts and Creative Writing MFA Program this fall. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Presentation: Poetry/Book Arts |
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Emily Carr has been a finalist in seven national poetry contests, most notably the 2011 National Poetry Series. Emily teaches writing and social action, why we need science fiction, the sexual politics of meat, and ecopoetics in practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is passionate about artist books, the rediscovery of Mississippi poet besmilr brigham, the sexual politics of meat, the limits of Achilles’s honesty and the problem of Chaucer’s spring, unposted love letters, cannibal chickens, and a ship too late to save the drowning witch. This summer, while Writer-In-Residence at Camac Centre d’Art, Emily composed Straight No Chaser, an artist book that experiments with “the poetry of fear.” Materials include a seafoam green Hermes 3000 typewriter, spray paint, Scotch tape, a fold-out Athens city guide, and the insatiable appetite of Frieda, Camac Cat. Emily is the author of two books of poetry, directions for flying (Furniture Press, 2010) and13 Ways of Happily: Books 1 & 2 (Parlor Press, 2011), three poetry chapbooks, one fiction chapbook, and a Tarot novel.
Panel: Indie Publishing in the Digital Age (with Sumanth Prabhaker and Emily Louise Smith) |
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Michelle E. Crouch holds a B.A. in Art History from Swarthmore College and a M.L.I.S. from the University of Pittsburgh, with a concentration in archives and preservation. She has worked at the Friends Historical Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Frick Fine Arts Library, and the Stoogeum, North America's only museum dedicated to The Three Stooges. Currently she is a second-year fiction MFA student at UNCW.
Panel: Library & Information Studies: Career Opportunities for Writers in the Digital Age (with Anne Akers, Doug Diesenhaus, and Sarah Barbara Watstein) |
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Doug Diesenhaus is the Administrative Projects Librarian at the UNC-Chapel Hill Library. He received an MSLS from the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in creative nonfiction from UNC Wilmington. He has worked at Poets & Writers and at Macmillan Publishers, and his book reviews and writing have been published in Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, The Virginian-Pilot, the Mid-American Review, and others.
Panel: Library & Information Studies: Career Opportunities for Writers in the Digital Age (with Anne Akers, Michelle Crouch, and Sarah Barbara Watstein) |
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Brian Evenson is the author of twelve books of fiction, most recently Immobility (Tor, 2012) and Windeye (Coffee House Press, 2012).In 2009 he published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association's award for best horror novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York's top books of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2008) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, German, Korean, Japanese, and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where from 2005 to 2012 he directed Brown University’s literary arts department. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Éric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.
Craft Presentation: Fiction |
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Ned Irvine teaches graphic design, typography, and artist’s bookmaking in the UNCW Department of Art and Art History. He is also a practicing graphic designer and graphic artist. His current practice assists artists and cultural clients with their printed communications, as well as making artist’s books. Before returning to teaching full time, Irvine worked in publication design for clients such as McGraw-Hill and Global Finance magazine. He also worked in software development for clients including the National Geographic Society and corporate communications for clients such as Red Hat, Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens, and the North Carolina Arts Council, as well as exhibition and interactive educational projects for the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is currently designing two books for the Cameron Art Museum.
Panel: The Survival and Evolution of Book Arts in the Digital Age (with Jen Bervin, Emily Carr, Sumanth Prabhaker, and Lisa Beth Robinson) |
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Cassandra Kircher's nonfiction has recently appeared in South Dakota Review, Cold Mountain Review, Flyway, and Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. She is the winner of the 2010 Notes in the Field contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011. She teaches nonfiction at Elon University.
Panel: Life after the BFA/MFA (with Chuck Adams, Lavonne Adams, and J. Allyn Rosser) |
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Sumanth Prabhaker is the founding editor of Madras Press, a publisher of short fiction whose catalog includes work by Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus, and several others. His novella A Mere Pittance was among the inaugural releases. Sumanth graduated from UNCW's MFA program in 2007.
Panel: Indie Publishing in the Digital Age (with Emily Carr and Emily Louise Smith) |
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Lisa Beth Robinson is the proprietor of Somnambulist Tango Press, where she makes artist’s books (letterpress, papermaking, printmaking), broadsides, and fine art, and is an assistant professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Her books visualize the relationship between language and experience, making connections between disassociated objects and concerns. Her degrees are from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Presentation: Letterpress Book Arts |
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J. Allyn Rosser’s most recent collection of poems, Foiled Again, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published in 2007 by Ivan R. Dee. Her first collection, Bright Moves, was selected by Charles Simic for the Morse Poetry Prize, and her second, Misery Prefigured, won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. She has received numerous awards for her work, among them the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize and the Frederick Bock Prize (both from Poetry), and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Ohio Arts Council and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Rosser has taught at the University of Houston, the University of Michigan, and Vermont College, and currently teaches at Ohio University. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006 and 2010, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, the Smithsonian Magazine, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, The Hopkins Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Georgia Review. She also serves as editor-in-chief of New Ohio Review.
Craft Presentation: Poetry |
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Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from The New York Public Library and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. He was awarded a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of writers to watch. Riverhead published a paperback edition of The End in 2009. The End is published or forthcoming in seven languages. Scibona's short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award. His work has appeared in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, The Threepenny Review, A Public Space, D di la Repubblica, Satisfiction, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Craft Presentation: Fiction
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A native New Englander, Sarah Barbara Watstein received her BA from Northwestern, MLS from UCLA, and MPA from New York University. She has worked in academic libraries for 35 years, including public and private institutions on both coasts. She began her career at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) in the late ’70s, and continued at New York University, Hunter College, Virginia Commonwealth University, and UCLA prior to relocating to Wilmington in May 2010. Watstein currently serves as UNCW’s University Librarian, and is co-chair of the University Library Advisory Council (ULAC), the governing body of the University Librarians of the UNC system. Along with Eleanor Mitchell, Watstein co-edits Reference Services Review (RSR) a quarterly, refereed, international journal dedicated to the enrichment of reference knowledge and the advancement of reference and library user services. Scholarly and creative activities include publications (administration, AIDS and infectious diseases, artificial intelligence, burnout, information technology, online and instructional services, reference services and sources, women’s studies) and presentations. Watstein has published extensively in two broad areas: academic librarianship and HIV/AIDS. Watstein’s record of service to the professional at the regional, national and international level is equally robust. She has held and holds a variety of leadership positions within the American Library Association. Professional service has focused on three areas—publishing, reference and user services, and women’s studies. Academic libraries, writing, editing, her 1½-year-old Belgian Malinois, her cat, hiking, and movies, particularly documentaries, are some of the passions in Watstein’s life.
Panel: Library & Information Studies: Career Opportunities for Writers in the Digital Age (with Anne Akers, Michelle Crouch, Doug Diesenhaus)
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Nature Tour with David Gessner and Michael White
Tuesday, November 6th @ 12:30 p.m.
This will be a fun, 45 min. bike tour of campus. Meet at 12:30 in the Kenan Hall Courtyard, with bike and helmet. We will discuss Wilmington Cross-City Bike Trail, bike commuting, and hiking and biking the UNCW trails. We will then proceed at easy social pace around UNCW portion of Cross-City trail, from Kenan Hall to terminus at Teal Street Bridge. After a break, we will split into two groups: those with mtn. bikes will have the option to sample trails in UNCW woods. Others will return to Kenan Hall on paved path. All cyclists welcome, all bikes welcome. Helmets required.
See our archive of Writers Week presenters.
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